Adaptec 2410SA Serial ATA RAID Controller Review. Page 6

We have already posted three reviews of four-channel SerialATA RAID controllers on our site. Now we’ve got hold of one more device like that, the Adaptec 2410SA. The manufacturing company claims it to be an ideal solution for workstations and entry-level servers where RAID arrays and support of four hard disk drives are important. Let’s check out how close to the ideal this solution is!

Without disk caching, RAID5 array slows down just like RAID0 in all modes save for the random read. The absolute performance loss is somewhat lighter, only 221% at maximum. When we disable lazy write for the drives in the array, the performance of RAID5 declines steadily as the writes share increases.

The performance of RAID10 array depends heavily on the enabled lazy writing for the drives. If you disable it, you may encounter a performance loss of 226%!

The controller cache buffer showed its best in the random write mode only: the array where the disks have lazy write suddenly speeds up under the linear workload in this mode.